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Research

Research efforts to define and measure media literacy are ongoing. This page provides information on some of the latest measurement tools and their evolution. Measurement tools help us define our ideas, and they are useful in research to examine relationships between these and other important variables. The goal of this research is to better understand the ways media literacy can contribute to informed citizenship in democratic societies and beyond.

News Literacy Research and Assessment

By Seth Ashley | Oct. 4, 2024

Thanks for your interest in news literacy research! As a subfield of media literacy, “news literacy” refers to the knowledge and skills needed to understand and participate in the production and consumption of reliable news and information.

My co-authors and I hope our work is helpful in your research and teaching. Anyone is welcome to use any of the following tools and resources in their own research, and you are free to adapt the items to your own cultural and/or national contexts.

Below you can find our most recent survey instrument, published in Communication Research in October 2024. We think this is currently the most up-to-date, well designed, and well validated news literacy knowledge measure. For the full article detailing the development and validation of the scale, you can use these links to find a preprint of the full peer-reviewed article or to go directly to the article page at CR.

The article can be cited as:

Maksl, A., Boedeker, P.J., Vraga, E.K., Craft, S., Tully, M., & Ashley, S. (2024). Developing and validating a 15-item true/false measure of news literacy knowledge. Communication Research.

 

True/False News Literacy Knowledge Scale

Question text with associated domain and correct answer. Possible responses for each item should include: True, False, and Don’t Know.

  1. Public media such as PBS and NPR depend primarily on advertising for financial support. (Context 1; False)
  2. Social media companies make money by collecting user data and selling targeted advertising. (Context 2; True)
  3. To operate in the U.S., news reporters must be licensed by the Society of Professional Journalists. (Context 3; False)
  4. News coverage of election campaigns rarely centers on in-depth analysis of where candidates stand on the issues. (Content 1; True)
  5. Having lots of “likes,” “shares,” or comments means a news story is credible. (Content 2; False)
  6. Only verified stories appear on Google News. (Content 3; False)
  7. A local journalist is more likely to write a story about a city council election than an election in a foreign country. (Creation 1; True)
  8. Journalists are rarely given deadline extensions if they can’t reach the best possible sources. (Creation 2; True)
  9. Employees at social media companies verify all news before it shows up on their platform. (Creation 3; False)
  10. The most prominent story on a news site is always the most important one. (Circulation 1; False)
  11. Most cities in the United States have fewer daily newspapers now than they did in the 1990s. (Circulation 2; True)
  12. Ad revenue from online news is not enough to compensate for drops in print newspaper advertising. (Circulation 3; True)
  13. Some people are more influenced by news than others. (Consumption 1; True)
  14. When the news presents politics as a game with winners or losers, people tend to trust politicians more. (Consumption 2; False)
  15. Most people feel comfortable when they hold two beliefs that are in conflict. (Consumption 3; False)

Here is some additional context and history behind our progress over the years so you can see how our work has evolved. The variety of author orders and dates can be confusing, so I hope it is helpful to see this laid out in one place.

Also note that we began our work using the term “news media literacy” to emphasize news literacy’s place within the broader domain of media literacy. After 2017, we transitioned to using the simpler and more commonly used term “news literacy,” but we still consider news literacy to be rooted in the broader framework of media literacy education. We encourage others to use “news literacy” to help bring related research and teaching efforts together even as we continue to debate various conceptualizations and approaches.

As our 2024 article describes, our latest measure is based on two related theory articles that help define and conceptualize news literacy:

Tully, M., Maksl, A., Ashley, S., Vraga, E. K., & Craft, S. (2022). Defining and conceptualizing news literacy. Journalism, 23(8), 1589–1606.

Vraga, E. K., Tully, M., Maksl, A., Craft, S., & Ashley, S. (2021). Theorizing news literacy behaviors. Communication Theory, 31(1), 1–21.

We developed the latest 2024 measure based on more than a decade of work, beginning with the work of Ashley, Maksl & Craft in this 2013 article:

Ashley, S., Maksl, A., & Craft, S. (2013). Developing a news media literacy scale. Journalism and Mass Communication Educator 68(1), 7-21.

We later created a newer measure using a knowledge-based framework for the first time in this 2015 article:

Maksl, A., Ashley, S. & Craft, S. (2015). Measuring news media literacy. Journal of Media Literacy Education 6(3), 29-45.

We deployed and tested the 2015 measure in a variety of studies such as these:

Maksl, A., Craft, S., Ashley, S., & Miller, D. (2017). The usefulness of a news media literacy measure in evaluating a news literacy curriculum. Journalism and Mass Communication Educator 72(2), 228-241.

Craft, S., Ashley, S., & Maksl, A. (2017). News media literacy and conspiracy theory endorsement. Communication and the Public 2(4), 388–401.

Ashley, S., Maksl, A., & Craft, S. (2017). News media literacy and political engagement: What’s the connection? Journal of Media Literacy Education 9(1), 79-98.

The Ashley, Maksl & Craft group later teamed up with Vraga and Tully to better conceptualize news literacy as in the two “theory” articles mentioned above as well as this article on COVID misinformation:

Ashley, S., Craft, S., Maksl, A., Tully, M., & Vraga, E. K. (2022). Can News Literacy Help Reduce Belief in COVID Misinformation? Mass Communication and Society, 26(4), 695–719.

Meanwhile, Vraga and Tully conducted a series of related studies with their colleagues such as the following:

Vraga, E. K., Tully, M., Kotcher, J. E., Smithson, A., & Broeckelman-Post, M. (2016). A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Measuring News Media Literacy. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 7(3), 41-53. https://doi.org/10.23860/jmle-7-3-4

Vraga, E. K., & Tully, M. (2019). News literacy, social media behaviors, and skepticism toward information on social media. Information, Communication & Society, 24(2), 150–166. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1637445

Vraga, E., Tully, M., & Bode, L. (2022). Assessing the relative merits of news literacy and corrections in responding to misinformation on Twitter. New Media & Society, 24(10), 2354-2371.

Vraga, E. K., Bode, L., & Tully, M. (2022). Creating News Literacy Messages to Enhance Expert Corrections of Misinformation on Twitter. Communication Research, 49(2), 245-267. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650219898094

For the 2024 measure, we teamed up with statistician Peter Boedeker.

The next step in our research is to develop assessments of news literacy skills, which are distinct from news literacy knowledge. Based on Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior, we think knowledge is a precursor to news literacy behaviors, which includes skills such as verification and identifying misinformation. This distinction is described in the 2021 Communication Theory article linked above.

For further reading on news literacy knowledge and research, check out my own book, News Literacy and Democracy, published by Routledge in 2020, and now available for free as an open-access resource at this link:

Ashley, S. (2020). News literacy and democracy. New York, NY: Routledge.

That’s it for now! Feel free to contact us with questions or to let us know about your own research innovations! Good luck!